By day, I serve as HP Open Source & Linux Chief Technologist. I help to ensure that Linux works well on HP computer systems, and contribute to other Open Source projects HP is involved in.

Many of my "spare nanoseconds" are consumed working on the Debian project, which I have been a contributor to since 1995, including serving as Project Leader in the past. In addition to working on Debian directly, I also serve as President of Software in the Public Interest, which is a non-profit umbrella organization providing services to Debian and other projects.

Ben Evans

Java isn't dead, it's just been sleeping! Look at its lovely new plumage! There's been much debate in the last year on the future of the Java language, many doom mongers have stated that Java as a language and as a platform is in decline and will no longer be relevant in the all too near future.

This talk debunks those naysayers and covers the exciting new world of a modern Java developer and how she can utilise the language and platform extensions to deliver awesome solutions. Our major themes:

We have a VM which is arguably the most capable on the planet - and it's GPL.

We have a wealth of new JVM languages which both complement and challenge the Java language.

We have a set of "software craftsmanship" tools which are increasingly mature - and they're open source.

This is a great time to be a developer working on this platform!

This would be a technical talk, but not closely tied to an specific F/OSS coding project. Some of the topics we will prepare are:

invokeDynamic & Method Handles - and how closures might evolve

How open source Java tool stacks won the war

Dynamic Languages on the platform (eg Clojure, Groovy)

How Concurrency is thriving in many (often very different) implementations on the JVM

Future Directions (eg fixnums, mandated tail-calls, type annotations)

The format will then be highly audience-led, to allow discussion of 2-3 topics during the talk, based on demand. This is a speaking style we've previously used and find it highly effective and popular with audiences.

Ben Evans and Martijn Verburg are co-authors for the upcoming “The Well-Grounded Java Developer (Covers Java 7)” for Manning Publications. The book is firmly aimed at the future direction of the Java language and platform with the open source nature of the OpenJDK as well as Ployglot languages on the JVM making the Java platform extremely compelling to work on as a FOSS developer.

Ben has been a professional developer and Open Source enthusiast since the late 90s. He has delivered world-class projects for banks, media companies and charities in that time, and currently works as a lead architect, principal engineer and in-house Java expert at one of the world’s leading financial institutions.

Cliff Click

Azul Systems has announced the Managed Runtime Initiative - basically a combination of a modified Linux kernel and a modified HotSpot JVM - to bring Azul's fantastic GC and profiling tools to the X86. We have worked hard to reduce all forms of pauses, and have *GC* pauses well in hand even for heaps with 10's of Gigs. Now other forms of pauses dominate.

This talk will discuss some of the issues involved with bringing this stack into Open Source and onto a commodity chip. Business issues: why Open Source? (to break a chicken-and-egg problem: we need OS changes but the OS vendors won't change unless there is a user). Hardware issues: Azul's GC needs Read Barriers and Metadata in Pointers which we used to get from our custom hardware + custom OS stack. How does this work on the X86?. OS issues: We need to (and can) re-map terabytes of virtual memory per second during GC - which we do with a new ABI into the linux kernel. Scheduler issues: The standard linux scheduler gives poor pause-time performance (but great throughput) - and we are attempting a low-pause system and that means soft-real-time. Other causes-for-pauses can come from priority inversion (doesn't happen when you have more CPUs than threads like our custom gear), lock convoying inside the JVM, X86 power management suddenly idling a CPU that is supposed to be advancing a thread to a safepoint, and all sorts of hypervisor interactions.

With more than twenty-five years experience developing compilers, Cliff serves as Azul Systems' Chief JVM Architect. Cliff joined Azul in 2002 from Sun Microsystems where he was the architect and lead developer of the HotSpot Server Compiler, a technology that has delivered dramatic improvements in Java performance since its inception.

Previously he was with Motorola where he helped deliver industry leading SpecInt2000 scores on PowerPC chips, and before that he researched compiler technology at HP Labs. Cliff has been writing optimizing compilers and JITs for over 20 years. He is invited to speak regularly at industry and academic conferences including ?JavaOne, JVM and VEE; serves on the Program Committee of many conferences (including PLDI and OOPSLA); and has published many papers about ?HotSpot technology. Cliff holds a PhD in Computer Science from Rice University.

David Fu

We will introduce the IcedRobot project, which consists of the GNUDroid and the GNUBishop subprojects.

GNUDroid is a project meant to create an Android implementation using Free Software components borrowed from GNU Classpath and OpenJDK. This will be the IcedRobot Micro Edition.

GNUBishop is a project meant to augment the standard features offered by Android with typical Desktop functionality that are missing in the mobile world. This will be the IcedRobot Standard Edition.

We will explain why we think is good that Android gets a more standardized API that can be used on Desktop as well as in the Embedded world, and what are the goals for the project.

Android is a suitable alternative and a compendium to Java Micro Edition, offering more capabilities but keeping a good deal of possible compatibility, but has not yet targeted the Desktops, although it already runs on high resolution devices as as InternetTV, the IcedRobot project will try to leverage this compatibility and unleash the full potential power of Android.

What the audience will learn from the talk

This talk is dedicated to all the people that have interest in Free Java in general and Android in particular. We hope to wet people’s appetite enough so that they will actually join the project, that is, first and above all, fun to do.

Hannes Wallnöfer

JavaScript used to be a despised programming language for animating web pages. But as browsers have grown up, so has the little language that came with them. And as people discover JavaScript as a simple, dynamic, functional language, the tendency to use the language outside the browser is on the rise.

Java has had a solid, open source JavaScript implementation with Mozilla Rhino for many years. However, JavaScript lacks basic concepts like code modules or a standard library. This is where RingoJS comes in. RingoJS adds a number of features to Rhino that make it suitable for real-world, large-scale application development:

A fast, auto-reloading, and CommonJS-compliant module loader.

A rich set of modules covering I/O, logging, persistence, development tools and much more.

Scalable HTTP server and client based on the Jetty project.

Support for CommonJS packages to install or write additional software components.

One part of my talk will be about how Ringo works by tapping into the great wealth of the open source Java ecosystem. Java integration in Rhino/Ringo is dead simple most of the time, and many of our modules are just thin JavaScript wrappers around Java libraries. Examples range from JavaScript Object-Relational mappers based on JDBC to the JSGI web server interface implemented on top of servlets to the POSIX implementation we were able to borrow from the JRuby project.

Another thing I'd like to talk about is how Rhino interacts with the JVM itself. Generating optimized Java bytecode for a language as dynamic as JavaScript is a big challenge. Optimization and performance tuning is an area where we (naturally) lag behind the big browser JS engines, and one that could potentially benefit a lot from being exposed to the many smart Java hackers at FOSDEM. Another JVM-related topic that is very exciting but also very complex is how Rhino and Ringo interact with the Java security model to (eventually) provide hosting of untrusted code.

Joe Darcy

Project Coin is an effort to add a set of small Java language changes to JDK 7. Early phases of Project Coin included an open call for proposals period and many design discussions have occurred on the OpenJDK coin-dev mailing list. The subsequent implementations of the features are in the OpenJDK 7 Hg repositories and the features are also supported in NetBeans 7 beta builds. Besides the actual features and their development, the talk will also discuss experiences in community involvement in on-going language evolution.

Karl Helgason

Currently it is not easy or even possible with current JavaSound API to write low-latency audio application without resorting using external libraries. Also JavaSound doesn't readily support 5.1/Surround or HD audio. I want talk about those shortcomings of JavaSound and give proposal how to fix it.

Mario Torre

We will introduce the IcedRobot project, which consists of the GNUDroid and the GNUBishop subprojects.

GNUDroid is a project meant to create an Android implementation using Free Software components borrowed from GNU Classpath and OpenJDK. This will be the IcedRobot Micro Edition.

GNUBishop is a project meant to augment the standard features offered by Android with typical Desktop functionality that are missing in the mobile world. This will be the IcedRobot Standard Edition.

We will explain why we think is good that Android gets a more standardized API that can be used on Desktop as well as in the Embedded world, and what are the goals for the project.

Android is a suitable alternative and a compendium to Java Micro Edition, offering more capabilities but keeping a good deal of possible compatibility, but has not yet targeted the Desktops, although it already runs on high resolution devices as as InternetTV, the IcedRobot project will try to leverage this compatibility and unleash the full potential power of Android.

What the audience will learn from the talk

This talk is dedicated to all the people that have interest in Free Java in general and Android in particular. We hope to wet people’s appetite enough so that they will actually join the project, that is, first and above all, fun to do.

Hacker for fun and freedom, free software enthusiast, musician and incurable romantic, he has served few key FLOSS projects like GNU Classpath and OpenJDK and is co-author of the Caciocavallo project. Mario has a strong interest in Computer Graphics and Human - Machine interaction and User Interface design. For his former employer he has developed several graphics libraries and ported Swing and AWT to various Operating Systems, as well as the Java binding for OpenGL and OpenGL ES, OpenKODE and other popular APIs. Currently works as a Software Engineer for JP Morgan Chase.

An update on Project Jigsaw, which aims to modularize the Java SE Platform, the JDK, and applications so as to reduce download times, improve startup performance, and -- most importantly -- make it easier to construct and maintain large Java programs in a way which integrates well with native packaging systems.

Mark Wielaard

With SystemTap you can observe your system on multiple levels, from kernel, libraries, applications to java programs. This talk will describe how support has been added to the HotSpot runtime engine to make your java programs more observable. This has been done in a way that is fully compatible with dtrace (to make our solaris hacker friends happy). We will discuss the various probes and information that can be retrieved through SystemTap. How the probes and the associated tapset were implemented. The limitation of such probes. And some ideas for the future to make java more observable.

Mark studied Theoretical Computer Science at the University of Amsterdam working on functional and logic programming languages.

In the past he has worked on GNUJSP and free servlet libraries. In 2000 he joined GNU Classpath and since 2003 he is the GNU maintainer and release manager of that project. Mark also wrote the The Hunting of the Snark project, an implementation of the BitTorrent protocol with GCJ and the java-gnome bindings.

Since 2006 he works for Red Hat in the Engineering Tools group. The Engineering Tools group works on projects like GCC, GDB, elfutils, SystemTap and Eclipse.

In 2007 when Sun announced they would release parts of the java reference implementation as Free Software under the GPL, he helped set up the IcedTea project which provides a full Free Software distribution of OpenJDK.

He currently lives in Deventer, the Netherlands and is employed by Red Hat as Senior Software Engineer to work on the SystemTap and elfutils projects.

Martijn Verburg

Java isn't dead, it's just been sleeping! Look at its lovely new plumage! There's been much debate in the last year on the future of the Java language, many doom mongers have stated that Java as a language and as a platform is in decline and will no longer be relevant in the all too near future.

This talk debunks those naysayers and covers the exciting new world of a modern Java developer and how she can utilise the language and platform extensions to deliver awesome solutions. Our major themes:

We have a VM which is arguably the most capable on the planet - and it's GPL.

We have a wealth of new JVM languages which both complement and challenge the Java language.

We have a set of "software craftsmanship" tools which are increasingly mature - and they're open source.

This is a great time to be a developer working on this platform!

This would be a technical talk, but not closely tied to an specific F/OSS coding project. Some of the topics we will prepare are:

invokeDynamic & Method Handles - and how closures might evolve

How open source Java tool stacks won the war

Dynamic Languages on the platform (eg Clojure, Groovy)

How Concurrency is thriving in many (often very different) implementations on the JVM

Future Directions (eg fixnums, mandated tail-calls, type annotations)

The format will then be highly audience-led, to allow discussion of 2-3 topics during the talk, based on demand. This is a speaking style we've previously used and find it highly effective and popular with audiences.

Ben Evans and Martijn Verburg are co-authors for the upcoming “The Well-Grounded Java Developer (Covers Java 7)” for Manning Publications. The book is firmly aimed at the future direction of the Java language and platform with the open source nature of the OpenJDK as well as Ployglot languages on the JVM making the Java platform extremely compelling to work on as a FOSS developer.

Martijn Verburg is a Java/JEE and open source consultant who is passionate about software craftsmanship and the creative power of technical communities. He currently is the co-leader for the London JUG, runs two open source projects (PCGen and Ikasan EIP) and is a bartender at the Javaranch.

Omair Majid

The javaws application implements the Java Network Launch Protocol (JNLP) and makes it easier to deploy applications. javaws supports running untrusted applications (within a sandbox) and trusted applications. It provides implementations of the JNLP API. Most importantly, it works with a large number of applications that have been released. So how does IcedTea pull all this off?

This talk will describe the JNLP implementation in IcedTea-Web (formerly IcedTea) with a focus on recent developments.

Omair Majid is an Associate Software Engineer at Red Hat and hacks on IcedTea and OpenJDK. He recently graduated from the University of Toronto with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering. He enjoys reading (especially science fiction) in his free time.

microblog:

blog:

Rémi Forax

JSR 292 introduces new bytecodes and a new API to ease the implementation of dynamic languages (Ruby, Python, Groovy, etc) on top of the JVM. IndyDroid is an experimental project aiming to implement JSR 292 on top of Android's Dalvik VM.

This talk will first present the concepts introduced by JSR 292 from a VM developer point of view and then how these concepts are/will be implemented in IndyDroid.

This talk introduces PHP.reboot is a new dynamic language running on top of any JVMs with JSR 292 support. After a short presentation of the language, I will present the key components of the runtime of PHP.reboot and how they interact to deliver awesome performance. This talk target runtime language developers and all people that want to know how a runtime language is implemented on top of the JVM.

Robert Lougher

Many free Java VMs use GNU Classpath as their class library. With the release of OpenJDK these VMs have another free, and mature library alternative. Porting a GNU Classpath based VM to OpenJDK is, however, non-trivial as the VM interfaces of the libraries are substantially different.

This talk will discuss the port of JamVM to the OpenJDK library. It will provide a brief overview of the library interfaces and will highlight several difficulties encountered due to mismatches in library/VM responsibilities.

The talk will be of particular interest to other runtime engineers thinking about doing a port to OpenJDK. However, it should be of interest to anybody who wishes to learn more about Java runtime internals, and the roles that the VM and class libraries play.

Simon Phipps

When Sun made OpenJDK open source, the team working on the licensing and FAQ had the best of intentions. All the same, my views about open source project best practice have changed as a consequence. I'll explain how, and why.

I will also discuss how the trajectory of Free Java has influenced my role in reforming the OSI, my position on Contributor Agreements and Software Freedom as a business benefit.

Simon Phipps is Chief Strategy Officer at ForgeRock, an independent software vendor devoted to true open source development of an identity-oriented software platform, I3.

In mid-2000 he joined Sun Microsystems where he helped pioneer Sun’s employee blogging, social media and community engagement programmes. In 2005 he was appointed Chief Open Source Officer, coordinating Sun’s extensive participation in Free and Open Source software communities until he left in 2010. In that role he oversaw the conversion to Free software of the full Java platform, the Solaris UNIX operating system, the SPARC architecture and the rest of Sun’s broad software portfolio, all under OSI-approved Free licenses.

He takes an active interest in several Free and Open Source software organisations, serving as a Director of the Open Source Initiative and on the advisory board of Open Source for America. A widely read thought-leader, he publishes regularly both on his own blog and in many other places such as IDG’s ComputerWorldUK. He is part of FossAlliance, a group of proven international consultants for free and open source software.

Stanislav Ochotnicky

Application developers should try to reach as many users as possible, yet it seems there is a shortage of Java applications packaged in Linux distributions. This is partially due to Java ecosystem and what is common in Java world.

Different Linux distributions have different packaging guidelines, but they all require certain prerequisites from packages. These mostly include: source releases, no bundled libraries and few other things. Talk will cover two most widely used Java build tools: Ant and Maven and how to set them up so that your application will be easier to package. Developers wishing to improve their chances of getting their application into distributions are the target audience.

Open-source enthusiast for almost a decade, user of various Linux distributions, co-founder of Fedora Java SIG[1]. I have been working daily on Java packaging in Fedora for past 9 months, participated in recent packaging guidelines changes, update of Maven in Fedora and addition of Maven 3 into Fedora repositories. From time to time I also do a bit of development[2] and blogging. I work for Red Hat, and in my free time I am also a developer for Gentoo Linux.

Steve O'Grady

The Java ecosystem, long a bastion of stability in an otherwise volatile industry, has been unusually challenged of late. Roiled by Oracle's litigation of Google, churned with the news that IBM decommited from Harmony in favor of OpenJDK and lately has been under attack from analysts. It many respects, the unrest couldn't have come at a worse time, as developer attention and focus is fragmenting under a constant stream of platform, language and framework fragmentation. What does this mean for free software developers?

We'll explore and unpack the recent events, and evaluate likely scenarios moving forward with an eye towards the implications of Java on the free software community, including the future of Java the language and Java the platform. This will include relevant metrics vis-a-vis developer attention and strategy, as well as an examination of projects important to the ecosystem.

Stephen O'Grady is the co-founder and Principal Analyst of RedMonk, a boutique industry analyst firm focused on developers. Founded in 2002, RedMonk provides strategic advisory services to some of the most successful technology firms in the world. Stephen's focus is on infrastructure software such as programming languages, operating systems and databases, with a special focus on open source. Before setting up RedMonk, Stephen worked as an analyst at Illuminata. Prior to joining Illuminata, Stephen served in various senior capacities with large systems integration firms like Keane and boutique consultancies like Blue Hammock. Regularly cited in publications such as the New York Times, NPR, the Boston Globe, and the Wall Street Journal, and a popular speaker and moderator on the conference circuit, Stephen's advice and opinion is well respected throughout the industry.

Thierry Carrez

While it is being used by a lot of open source developers, Java is a second-class citizen in most Linux distributions. This is not really due to the language itself, but is more a conflict between two ecosystems. This presentation will explain in detail the two main reasons why distribution developers generally hate Java: binary library bundling and source dependency inflation. We'll also see that there seem to be no painless solution out of this situation and that the position of the two ecosystems will have to evolve if we want to fix this issue.

Thierry Carrez is currently the Release Manager for the OpenStack project. An Ubuntu Core developer and Debian maintainer, he was previously the Technical lead for Ubuntu Server edition, and as such was deeply involved in the issue of Java packaging in distributions. In older times he was an operational manager for the Gentoo Security Team and a Gentoo Council elected member.

Tom Marble

Modern GNU/Linux distributions took us out of dependency hell. Sun liberated Java and the community packaged OpenJDK for Debian, Fedora and other distributions. The Jigsaw project of OpenJDK aims to take us out of the JAR hell that is imposed by the JVM and associated baggage. This talk is an update on efforts to use Jigsaw to match the Java module dependency graph to the Debian package dependency graph for a more intimate, and appropriate, matching of Java to GNU/Linux.

Why is solving this puzzle important? Because many Java applications don't need things like CORBA, SNMP and XML which currently are part of every Java Runtime Environment. Those applications should not have to pay the price in terms of slower startup time, greater memory footprint and larger (dependent) package space. The Free Software world needs Java to tease apart component modules so that applications can be appropriately refactored and maintained individually.

While Oracle has deferred Jigsaw until JDK 8 (currently targeted for 2012) Free Java in the form of OpenJDK allows the community to experiment with and understand the value of modularity today.

After obtaining a masters in electrical engineering, Mr. Marble developed advanced electronic CAD software for Honeywell and later Data General in the US then moved to Paris to work for Compagnie Général d'Informatique. He returned to the US to become CIO for Quicksilver Express Courier in his native Minnesota, designing and managing multiple data centers. He was later offered a position at Sun Microsystems as an Enterprise Systems Engineer, then progressed to Chief Technologist for Sun's national dot.com sales area before joining R&D as a Senior Java Performance Engineer. Following Sun's decision to open source the Java programming language he was selected to be the first to hold the role of OpenJDK Ambassador. Most recently he has launched Informatique LLC: a consultancy to leverage his electrical engineering education along with his software development experience for clients in such domains as telematics for electric vehicles, enterprise Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), and highly concurrent software design.

Torsten Werner

The talk shows the problems of packaging Java code in a way that the result conforms to minimal packaging standards. Sometimes code does not get build completely from source, sometimes non-free software gets used and sometimes the license terms are not correct. Ways to improve that situation will be shown on the example of Maven.

The number of source packages maintained by the Debian Java packaging team has increased a lot during the lasts years to about 500 but important packages like the popular JBoss application server are still missing. Compared to Java the Perl group is maintaining about 1600 source packages. This talk won't cover the JDK like OpenJDK and it won't criticize the Java programming language.